But don’t just take our word for it. Check out what Light Reading (the premier publication for the telecom industry) had to say in its story, “GoGrid Puts Cloud at a Touch of a Button.” As reported by Carol Wilson, the article underscores the reasons why orchestration is so attractive to telcos:

“The attraction is taking the complexity out of provisioning applications, and while GoGrid is initially focused on big data apps, this approach can support other kinds of applications as well, says Caroline Chappell, senior analyst with Heavy Reading. Telecom cloud service providers have been trying to develop this capability themselves so they can offer business customers the ability to stand up a whole range of applications in the cloud without individually engineering each one through a complex process, she says.

“Telecom cloud providers can make the provisioning process part of the service they offer, even if the application itself is run by an app partner in a third-party cloud, Chappell notes. That creates the ability for telecom cloud providers to offer a cloud-based “business in a box” type offer that doesn’t require complex provisioning of each individual service.”

Orchestration is key for telcos to quickly and easily increase the variety and number of products they offer. It also keeps them focused on what they do best: selling solutions wrapped with value-added services instead of commodity infrastructure. Click here to learn more about GoGrid’s orchestration and 1-Button Deploy™ solutions.

Associations with Big Data tend to be pretty clinical – it’s often considered a tool to make more accurate scientific statements, identify trends in social media and news, and develop products by gauging customer response. In other words, the cloud computing tool was largely viewed as a shortcut to making money and creating new offerings for the public, whether that was a breakthrough medication, a new way to communicate wirelessly, or something the world had never even heard of. A less common but equally fascinating use of the technology, however, is as a storytelling mechanism – a capability that can be the most powerful use of all.

As in previous generations, science and storytelling need to coexist to remain powerful, a fact that rings true when considering the developing uses of Big Data.

The value of storytelling
The concept of storytelling and the value of its teller is a tradition ingrained in basic human culture that has existed for thousands of years. In generations past, before the written word and widespread publishing of books and magazines, storytellers would enthrall listeners with memorized speeches in the manner of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and Homer’s “Odyssey.” A recent piece on the Fast CoCreate blog detailed some of the finer points of this tradition.

“Results repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story,” the source stated. “In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.”

These statements have plenty of evidence to back them up – stories sell. The movie and publishing industry bring in billions every year, and even our most prevalent social media tools, especially Facebook, are designed to tell the “story” of a user’s life online by highlighting what events and posts have received the most attention. This is just one example of mass data being boiled down to a basic storyline, but it’s a valuable one. Even Snapchat, the ever-present application that is famous for showing a user an image for a few seconds that disappears shortly thereafter, has introduced the “Snapchat Stories” feature that lets users create a narrative from their brief messages.

How Big Data tells a story with accuracy and impact
There’s no doubt that the science behind Big Data is inescapable, but some data scientists have struggled to transform this information into a palatable story for the everyday user to consume. Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin, data scientists for the activist charity-driven website Dosomething.org, wrote about this process, with which they’re still constantly experimenting, in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review.

An introduction to multi-cloud distributed application architecture

In this blog, we’ll explore how to architect a highly available (HA) distributed application in the cloud. For those new to the concept of high availability, I’m referring to the availability of the application cluster as well as the ability to failover or scale as needed. The ability to failover or scale out horizontally to meet demand ensures the application is highly available. Examples of applications that benefit from HA architectures are databases applications, file-sharing networks, social applications, health monitoring applications, and eCommerce websites. So, where do you start? The easiest way to understand the concepts is simply to walk through the 3 steps of a web application setup in the cloud.

In general, the application architecture can be pretty simple: perhaps just a load-balanced web front end running on multiple servers and maybe a NoSQL database like Cassandra. When you’re developing, you can get away with a single server, but once you move into production you’ll want to snapshot your web front end and spread the application across multiple servers. This approach lets you balance traffic and scale out the web front end as needed. In GoGrid, you can do this for free using our Dynamic Load Balancers. Point and click to provision the servers as needed, and then point the load balancer(s) to those servers. The process is simple, so setting up a load-balanced web front end should only take a few minutes. Any data captured or used by the servers will of course be stored in the Cassandra cluster, which is already designed to be HA.

Deploying the Cassandra cluster. In GoGrid, you can use our 1-Button Deploy™ technology to set up the Cassandra cluster in about 10 minutes. This will provision the cluster for your database. Cassandra is built to be HA so if one server fails, the load is distributed across the cluster and your application isn’t impacted. Below is a sample Cassandra cluster. A minimal deployment has 3 nodes to ensure HA and the cluster is connected via the private VLAN. It’s a good idea to firewall the database servers and eliminate connectivity to the public VLAN. With our production 1-Button Deploy™ solution, the cluster is configured to include a firewall on-demand (for free). In another blog post I’ll discuss how to secure the entire environment: setting up firewalls around your database and your web application as well as working with IDS and IPS monitoring tools and DDoS mitigation services. For the moment, however, your database and web application clusters would look something like this:

As Big Data continues to become a part of our everyday lives, new uses for the technology emerge that stand to improve the quality of life for millions of people. Such is potentially the case for the citizens of Beijing as one of the major projects in the field starts to take shape: an initiative to eliminate some of the city’s dangerous smog to improve the health of residents. IBM has announced that this plan will roll out over the next 10 years, with an emphasis on transforming the way air quality is analyzed.

As Big Data continues to become a part of our everyday lives, new uses for the technology emerge that stand to improve the quality of life for millions of people.

Pollution disrupts professional routines and overall health
The pollution in Beijing has not only reduced the life expectancy of those who live in the heart of the city, but its constant presence prevents citizens from enjoying their daily lives. According to a recent piece from Quartz writer Gwynn Guilford, the Chinese government is tasked with shutting down many of the basic operations of the city, including the closure of schools and factories and limiting the number of cars that can safely drive within city limits when PM2.5 concentrations grow too high.

Here’s where the cloud infrastructure comes in. Because Big Data works best when mass amounts of information are collected and then boiled down to deliver a concise result, IBM intends to use the method to learn more about what pollutes the air around Beijing by monitoring changes in the atmosphere.

“Called ‘Green Horizon,’ the project will focus on air quality management, renewable energy management, and energy optimization among Chinese industries,” Guildford explained. “As part of the initiative, IBM has already signed a partnership with the Beijing government, which is hoping to tap into the company’s expertise to help tackle the city’s air pollution crisis.”

Cloud servers will be used to analyze current air quality in the city and identify potential solutions for alternative energy. Reuters writer David Stanway speculated that the biggest source of pollution is likely still smog from factories and cars, and that IBM can probably use the same Big Data tools that identified the problem to find effective solutions. Possible long-term projects might include solar- and wind-powered installations within the city to reduce energy consumption.

There are few technologies that promise to improve as many different industries as Big Data. Whether it’s medicine or the weather in your backyard, the mass aggregation and analyzing of information could result in marked improvement and insight on nearly anything. The cloud computing technology may even change the way we have fun. It has already had an impressive effect on the video gaming industry and will have a great deal of influence on determining what the runaway hits of tomorrow will be. Here’s are a few small but important insights into the world of the gamer.

There are few technologies that promise to improve as many different industries as Big Data.

Big Data observes the user learn the game
The emerging technology offers those marketing and developing video game developers more insight than ever into what makes players tick, what makes them happy, and what keeps them engaged. Any game’s success is directly connected to the “addiction” factor – what is it about a certain game that makes users feel they can’t stop playing, and even more important, how can that feeling be monetized? To study this objective further, each activity must be stripped down to individual characters, levels, and other gameplay features to determine what works and what doesn’t.

Qubole writer Gil Allouche wrote a piece on how Big Data can be used to decide how difficult individual levels should be in future incarnations of any given game. A cloud server can track how long it takes each player to finish a level, indicating whether early levels are too simple and need to be beefed up in difficulty or are discouraging new users because they’re too challenging. Mass amounts of data can help narrow down the right decision for an individual game.

Increasing sales on cloud-based consoles
For nearly all current gaming systems, the Internet and cloud hosting have integrated seamlessly to foster more sales as well as engagement between players on massively popular interactive games. By basing the gaming store online with the ability to be accessed on the console itself, gamers are saved a trip to the store and can download a new experience right to their system in real time, giving them less time to question a decision and dive right into a purchase. Big Data also allows companies to better “recommend” similar games and products to the ones a gamer is already enjoying, increasing the likelihood of sealing a sale.

Real-world examples
EA Games is one of the largest video game developers and distributors on the planet, and announced a new commitment to improving its business model and products with the help of Big Data earlier this year. This will give the company a huge technological advantage, especially when it comes to targeting advertising and maximizing player-to-player interaction in major gaming successes like Activision’s “Call of Duty” franchise and EA’s own “Battlefield” franchise. Silicon Angle, a science and technology blog, reported on the gaming company’s major statement.